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Originally Posted by Dr. Hfuhruhurr
Boy, I haven't actually read BG #1-4 (that's pretty brave of you). All I remember about #5 was him fighting some guy with an axe on an alien planet, along with a woman and a kid. And the woman got some kind of awful green jumpsuit out of the alien's machine. Wow, even with those sketchy memories, it sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?
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Your sketchy memories aren't wrong. The fight is a misunderstanding, the alien helps them figure out how to get home, and dies.
The other four issues are just empty superhero bash-ups. No knock on the guys who did them, who did much better work elsewhere, but there was nothing there to work with, and nobody had any time to figure anything out.
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I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when someone made the pitch for the Black Goliath solo series. Now, THERE'S a salesman.
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As I understand it, there was no pitch. The execs upstairs decided they needed five new books in a tearing hurry, and there was no time to think about it, so Len Wein (who was EIC at the time), Marv Wolfman (about to become EIC) and several staffers went out to lunch and made up books they could get rolling that very day. BLACK GOLIATH, INHUMANS, MARVEL CHILLERS (featuring Mordred), MARVEL PRESENTS (Bloodstone) and ADVENTURES ON THE PLANET OF THE APES were the books they made up, I think. Once they had a chance to think, the contents of CHILLERS and PRESENTS changed (to Tigra and Guardians of the Galaxy, respectively), but none of the books lasted.
BLACK GOLIATH came out a few months after the others, but if what I'm told is right, it was cooked up at that lunch.
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Is his solo series where Bill Foster got the urban background, or would that have been in his Power Man appearances?
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It's in #1; I don't remember whether there's any hint of it in the POWER MAN stuff.
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Now, to get back to the Triathlon discussion for a moment (but only a moment), here's a character I just thought about who makes Triathlon look like a star: Rage. I cannot explain to you how much I loathe the character Rage. I can only imagine what Smarty will say, because all of his objections to Triathlon apply to Rage to the Nth degree.
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Rage is actually a lot more palatable when you go back and re-read the early stuff with the understanding that he's a 13-year-old boy trying to act like his idea of a grownup hero, but since that was a secret at the time, he just came off as lame, and by the time the secret was revealed, nobody cared. But Fabian managed some good stuff with him in NEW WARRIORS, and I had fun writing him in NIGHT THRASHER. My take on NIGHT THRASHER was that it was Batman & Robin, if Batman was a young black man and Robin was the Hulk...
kdb